


when you reached the frontier

by prolix



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: (We Love To See It), Character Study, M/M, Paladin Fjord (Critical Role), Prayer As A Form Of Intimacy, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:02:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23962813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prolix/pseuds/prolix
Summary: There are nights when sleep doesn’t come easily, like it should. Like it used to, before he cracked every rib hitting compacted waves and sank into the depths, feeling his own eyes replaced by bright beacons of something ancient and cruelty-yellow and hateful. Sometimes he’s angry the second he wakes, fresh from the tide and spitting salt.It’s not worth thinking about,he reminds himself again.(Fjord’s not good with storms.)
Relationships: Caduceus Clay & Fjord, Caduceus Clay/Fjord
Comments: 7
Kudos: 80





	when you reached the frontier

**Author's Note:**

> wow i literally can’t get over the idea of mutual worship as a romantic ice breaker thanks taliesin
> 
> (continuity’s loose but it’s post-xhorhaus and post-hexaladin and that’s what’s important at the end of the day)
> 
> title from fleet foxes’ “he doesn’t know why”  
> muse(ic) is goliath by woodkid  
> enjoy, and i love you!
> 
> update: written before c2e114
> 
> \- p
> 
> * obligatory warning label: discusses fjord’s patron dreams, so be aware of descriptions of drowning, suffocation, abusive power dynamics, and just a lot of psychological trauma from being bound to a giant evil underwater leviathan

There’s a storm front approaching Rosohna from the west. Fjord can feel the static electricity in his joints, and he figures it either means he’s getting old too quickly, or he’s in the wrong line of work for preserving cartilage. After watching Beau roll her wrists, irritated and sore over dinner the night before the rain hits, he concludes it’s probably both.

Caleb’s hair frizzes like it always does in any kind of humidity, and Veth keeps sending mistrustful glances up at the black-domed sky and asking Essek if the Kryn can’t just make it _water resistant._ Both of them mutter about keeping indoors for a while and disappear into their respective work stations, Frumpkin poofed up to half again his size at their heels.

Caduceus takes to standing at the base of his tree and breathing deep into the wind, gauging the severity of the lightning by the time between its strike and the thunder rolling over the moorlands. It rattles through the wood boarding, vibrating the slats over the windows. Fjord’s not entirely sure it’s safe to stand next to essentially the tallest thing in the city proper outside of the Lucid Bastion and _test the air,_ but Caduceus doesn’t seem worried. Then again, he’s the type of firbolg to plant a sixty foot tree in a house and then calmly step outside to greet the crowd that formed to ogle it, so maybe favor trends toward the center.

The night it hits the Xhorhaus, Fjord is woken by the sound of thunder crackling just barely outside of the city gates, and it’s strong enough to travel through the frame of his bed and jar the mattress. He sits upright and instinctually flexes his wrist for the falchion, tasting saltwater and brine foam and blood behind his teeth, and then his breath catches up with him and he rubs a hand across his eyes instead. The rain pelts his window, and it sounds too much like the crackle and hiss of rain on the sea. He feels very, very small, like a body cast out into the water. He feels heavy, too, as though he’s water-logged.

He changes on a reflex to get the residual discomfort of sweat off his body and give his hands something to do. The hallway outside his room is dark, and the doors are all closed - no one else was woken up by the thunder, and for a second it sinks something in Fjord’s rib cage to know he was the only one shaken awake.

 _Uk’otoa’s still got his claws in you, boy,_ Fjord hisses to himself, climbing the tower stairs, and ignores the hitching accent in his head that still sounds a bit like Vandren. It’s not worth thinking about.

There are nights when sleep doesn’t come easily, like it should. Like it used to, before he cracked every rib hitting compacted waves and sank into the depths, feeling his own eyes replaced by bright beacons of something ancient and cruelty-yellow and _hateful._ Sometimes he’s angry the second he wakes, fresh from the tide and spitting salt. _It’s not worth thinking about,_ he reminds himself again, but it feels tepid in the cradle of his skull before it even fully forms.

The rain is vicious above. It pours in waves down from the boughs of the massive oak in front of him, making the strings of liquid sunlight tied above sway and refract in their muted light. The thunder feels like it’s coming from the earth itself, about to crack the city in half and swallow it whole, pressing upward from the core of the planet with a rage so large it would devour Fjord without noticing. He grits his teeth and casts _control water_ to redirect the rain above him. It slides harmlessly into the beds of moss and tightly-woven clover.

He’s a bit tired of being drenched. He figures it’s earned.

Caduceus doesn’t keep any kind of ornamental plants growing in the tower-top garden, even grasses. Everything has utility. It’s comforting, actually - a reminder that there is use in so much of the natural world, if it can be found. That there is aid, in some form or another, literally springing from the soil to be harvested.

As the partition of his _control water_ gets closer to the base of the tree and its sprawling, sturdy thicket of roots, it gets a little easier to see. The downpour obscures a lot of the clarity of Fjord’s darkvision, but it pieces itself together as he steps over the slope of a root the width of his torso like light through a prism.

Caduceus is knelt in front of the trunk of the tree, sheltered from the rain by a low bough covered in broad, intensely green leaves. The roots seem to fold in around him like many dozens of arms, curled toward his body and holding him in place in a small cradle. Fjord can make out his ears flicking back and forth, gentle, listening for the thunder in between the raindrops. Or maybe listening for the raindrops beneath the thunder.

“I’m guessing that’s you, Mister Fjord?” Caduceus calls out as he slips on a thin patch of mulch, tilting his head just barely over his shoulder. He doesn’t open his eyes.

“You’re getting better at that,” Fjord calls back, grumbling at the soaked, rich-black earth slicked across his boots. Once it dries and cakes it’ll be impossible to crack through. 

He doesn’t say out loud that he was trying to make his footfalls reach over the din of the storm - the firbolg has been very cautious about when he puts his back to things since the attack in the Invulnerable Vagrant, and Fjord would rather slip in the mud than spook him like that any day. He’s pretty sure Caduceus already knows that’s what he’s doing, anyway.

“I like knowing how my friends sound,” Caduceus shrugs lightly, serene, his voice almost lost amid the bass thrum of the storm. Fjord thinks inanely that Caduceus himself sounds a bit like a storm, the gentle see-sawing of a boat in open water, the shearing of ice in port as it’s cleaved by the hull. He used to like those noises when he was younger, before they lost their comforting vastness, the depth of wild danger layered in thick bands of board and varnish. Fjord’s seen too many ships crack in half like tearing through wet paper to feel the same way now. It would be nice to be lulled to sleep by the sound of a storm again.

He steps up gingerly onto the semi platform holding the firbolg, leaning back against the thick bark of the oak and finding it blessedly dry.

Caduceus blinks open his eyes, a few raindrops clumped into his lashes and the front of his beard. He looks more comfortable in this wet than the way Fjord remembers him on the ocean - curled against the deck and willing his body to untense, muscle by muscle, from the instinct to struggle against so much crushing saltwater. He remembers feeling cruelly justified in the moment, shamefully, as though Caduceus’ suffering beneath the waves validated his own.

“Sorry to disturb,” Fjord smiles at him, sheepish, running a hand back through his hair and wincing at how long it’s getting, “you looked pretty into it.”

Caduceus tilts his head.

“You’re not disturbing anybody,” he replies with those unnervingly clear eyes pinned directly on Fjord’s. He feels himself swallow. Caduceus has always been good at pressing his thumb into the heart of things, finding a meaning that accidentally brushes the surface and pulling it out like sprouts from soil. It should feel worse, Fjord thinks, to be so understood. It should feel invasive, to be known. It used to, but these days he’s speaking with his natural voice and letting his tusks press into his top lip, a handmade symbol of Melora affixed to the clasp in his cloak, so what does he know?

Fjord gestures up at the black sheet of sky, the rain not so much breaking through the dome as much as rippling through it like it’s falling from a still pond. The starlight shimmers and bends in this weather.

“Can’t you, I dunno, _control weather_ this shit?”

Caduceus raises an eyebrow at him. He spreads his palms against his knees and cracks his neck. He must’ve been out here for a while already, Fjord thinks as he tracks the motion, if the damp is getting to him.

“Ah. Now why would I wanna do that?” He asks, curious.

Fjord opens his mouth. He shuts it.

“Not,” he says, slowly, rolling the words around in his mouth before committing to their shape, “the biggest fan of storms. Not since, y’know. Yeah.”

Caduceus nods. He pushes his hair over his shoulder, testing how wet it’s gotten since the rain rolled in.

“Hm, yeah, I see that. Have you ever prayed during one?”

Fjord laughs despite himself. He feels the crown of his skull gently knock against the trunk of the oak as he tips his chin back. A drop of water slips from his temple and down the curve of the tendon in his neck. It feels, for a second, like the path Avantika had traced with her claw-like nail the night he’d entered her quarters, shiny-smooth and dumb as bricks and trying so hard to get the people with him out of this newest encounter alive. He hadn’t managed it the last time he had been on a ship, after all.

“Prayed a lot during storms, Caddy, yeah. You tend to, on ships.”

Caduceus grins at him, crooked on one side like the expression is curling open, a fern unfurling. Fjord is still unsure of how to take in the deliberate way he moves, like a glacier cleaving through a harbor, unbreakable and slow. He hasn’t known many people who smile at him like that, like the intent is eons in the making, starlight reaching their eyes from the span of galaxies.

“I meant to the Wildmother.”

Fjord glances up distrustfully through the boughs of the tree. The sound of rain against the leaves is different from how it snaps against the window in his room - muted. Softer, gentler.

“Sure that’s safe, with the lightning?”

Caduceus shakes his head.

“This place is safe,” he says, simply, and Fjord blinks at him.

“Oh. Um, sure. Would you mind company, then?”

The firbolg studies him for half a second, eyes dipping to the way he’s folded his arms, the top of his spine pressed into the trunk, the tension of his shoulders that carries him through every thunder strike.

“I never mind your company, Mister Fjord.”

Caduceus shifts to the side, sliding into a cross-legged position like Fjord’s seen him take dozens of times before. He mimics it, settling into the surprisingly dry bed of moss below. His shoulder blades barely touch the center of Caduceus’ back, but it’s still grounding to know they’re both covered from what they can’t see. He feels the firbolg relax into it, too, and Fjord lets his chin drift toward his collar bone and focuses on the sound of rain.

“On the ocean, what did it sound like?” Caduceus asks quietly. Fjord’s surprised he can even hear him, over the din.

He flexes the hands in his lap, one curled up and resting in the palm of the other and breathes in, deep and slow. Caduceus had taught him to breathe in the heart of a forest, to attune his lungs to the breath of trees and green, growing things. Far from brine and ice and oxygen-crushing depths. It clears his head.

“Like it was coming from everywhere,” he admits after a while, “the thunder would move through the water and into the hull, and you’d know real fast that you were the tallest thing for miles and miles. Lightning could kill your mast. We’d have to close the sails and if you slipped on the ropes, that was it.”

Caduceus hums, and it carries. The tree seems to absorb the sound, the little cocoon of dry air around them reverberating with it. It shouldn’t sound like thunder, Fjord thinks, but it does - gentle, soft, like a storm you see on the horizon as it passes by you. A change in atmosphere.

“It scares you,” he says. It almost manages not to make Fjord flinch.

“You don’t have to be ashamed of that,” Caduceus continues, his voice even and measured, and anyone else would be scrambling to assure him that that’s not what they meant, to correct themselves that he’s not _afraid,_ of course not, but the firbolg at his back puts his words gently at Fjord’s feet and lets them linger, “there’s nothing wrong with being afraid. A storm is a force of nature no one can control, and that’s pretty scary, yeah. But it waters the earth, and fills the rivers, and stirs around the sediment. Everything takes cover in a storm, and for a while it’s all very peaceful. You can feel it, right?”

Fjord keeps his eyes closed. He tilts his head back and listens to the rushing of the leaves far overhead.

“Everything in the city is still,” he replies quietly, “they’re all waiting for it to pass.”

“And it will,” Caduceus agrees, his voice still rumbling up through Fjord’s fingertips and catching on the raindrops around them, “it will eventually wash itself away, and things will be clean and fresh and very, very muddy afterward. It’s so nice.”

Fjord grins.

“You can hear her in the thunder,” Caduceus murmurs, “if you listen.”

Fjord rests his head against the space between his shoulder blades and waits for the next peal of thunder, the strike of light crossing across his eyelids.

The ozone in the air splits and shifts, and Fjord feels a thrum of energy to the south. He tilts his face in that direction, eyes still closed, and the lightning meets him as a bright white arc glancing over the darkness. Thunder rolls in on its heels, churning through the air like a massive wave breaking open on the shore. Fjord feels himself tense, the sound a sharp pressure against the base of his skull and spine, a crushing palm forcing him _down and down and down._

Caduceus lifts his voice again to meet it, humming a solid one-note tone that mingles in the air. Fjord can feel the vibrations from his rib cage in his own, rumbling and warm and calm.

And at the end of it, as they both subside and Caduceus sighs, there’s a _sound._ A lack of tremors, a stillness that becomes its own noise, and Fjord instinctively reaches as though grasping for a life preserver and searches the sudden quiet for the warm breath of the Wildmother. 

He feels like a child again - he does often, with her, and he wonders how Caduceus can stand it. He feels small and pitiable and so overwhelmed and safe that it scares him. He’s only ever really known the evisceration of weakness, as it was carved from him over and over. But Caduceus looks at him kindly, speaks to him gently, and the Wildmother holds his jaw in her hands on nights when he can reach her and tells him she’s proud of him, of his growth. Of his weakness, tangling like thick roots into his chest, speaking in his own voice. It’s dizzying. He wants to feel it _all the time._

“Hey, easy,” Caduceus murmurs, and shifts a fraction of an inch to brush the column of his spine against Fjord’s, “there’s no need for that. She’ll come, if it’s willing.”

“Sorry,” Fjord breathes.

“Oh, it’s alright,” Caduceus says, because he forgives as easy as breathing, “do you need help?”

The thunder rolls again, rattling Fjord’s tusks and setting them vibrating against his lip. Rain marks a line down his back as it slips under the collar of his loose sleep shirt. The branches of the oak shift and creak but hold steady, firm and wiry growth. He bites down hard on the inside of his cheek anyway.

It’s been a long time since he’s slept through a storm, and longer since he was able to dream when it rained and not awaken to bile and acidic brine and the taste of his own death in his throat. The thing that sealed his falchion into him with kelp and blood took that away from him. It had always felt violating, _cruel,_ and it took him too long to realize that was rather the point. 

“Please.”

Caduceus uncurls and turns to sit facing Fjord. Fjord follows suit and feels gentle, placid eyes on him before he sees them. The firbolg’s head is tilted to the side, glancing from his fists to his shoulders to his jaw and back. He feels remarkably un-analyzed. Caduceus doesn’t look to _know_ something about a person; just to make them aware of an attention he’s already been paying.

“It’s real hard for you to keep your focus when you’re thinking about your pact with him, huh?” He asks eventually, and Fjord just clicks his jaw shut. _There we go._

“I’m done with that,” he says, then winces and corrects, “I _have been_ done with it.”

“Something being over isn’t the same as having closure for it, Mister Fjord,” Caduceus reminds him softly. He speaks as though he’s quoting Fjord’s own words back to him, not a single trace of admonishment, of shame. It could bring tears to his eyes if he wasn’t already too heartbreakingly used to it. This is just how the firbolg has always been, and isn’t Fjord more grateful than anything for that fact. More grateful than the shiny medallion on his bedside table in his room, than the copper and silver holy symbol pinned to his cloak over the foot of his bed.

“Desperation is useful for a lot of things,” Caduceus continues, thoughtful, after a second, “it’s what makes our little group so good in a fight, I’d wager. Yeah. It gives you a direction, and some urgency to get there quick, too. But there are really wonderful, nice things that come to you without having to chase them.”

“Like?” Fjord asks. He can’t quite help but sound humorless, and flinches away at his own flat affect. He sounds like he did the night in the alley when Uk’otoa had stripped his magic from him: threadbare with panic and thin with grief and aching, in his ribs, for anything to sink his teeth into next and prove himself worthy.

The Wildmother’s paladins shouldn’t be so savage and desperate, he thinks.

“For you?” Caduceus ducks his head and seeks his gaze with wide, pink-red doe eyes of his own.

“Ah. Forgiveness, I should think, for one thing. I don’t think that comes half as hard as you’re thinking it does, Mister Fjord, and not half as long, either.”

Lightning strikes beyond the city gates framing the Ghostlands, bleaching the world into overexposed whites and contrasts. Stark dividing lines between light and dark captures the oak, and illuminates one of Caduceus’ hands as he reaches up and curls his fingers around Fjord’s shoulder. They’re more or less curled up toward one another like this, and Fjord hasn’t felt safer during a storm in a long, long time. The wind barely glances off of him as he breathes in deep and tests the air. The rain is an afterthought.

“Kindness, too,” Caduceus tells him under his breath, “and the ability to grow. No one is going to take those away from you, Fjord - you can do that yourself, yeah; it’s pretty common for people to turn away gentleness freely-given in times like these - but I think you understand the value of them a lot more than most. You’ve been without them for a long time, maybe, but you don’t have to be.”

The space between them is warm with their breath, a cocoon pulled tight within the bounds of the roots. The droplets of light above sway and twirl on their strings.

Fjord gives him a best approximation of a smile and flicks his eyes up to the boughs overhead.

“How’s that relate to being scared of thunder?”

Caduceus beams at him, and Fjord’s punched by the feeling of fondness so quickly that he reaches up and covers the firbolg’s hand with his own just to hold onto it.

“Ah. You came up here to ask for help,” he replies, easy as breathing, “and I’d say that’s pretty kind to yourself. You’re getting there. You don’t typically admit you’re scared of anything, you know, even when you got pinned by that tortoise that one time.”

Fjord tips his head back a bit and laughs, running the pad of his thumb over Caduceus’ knuckles. They’re roughened by being plunged into the dirt, helping plant new, frightened things and harvesting them again when they face the sunlight.

“It was bigger than _you_ are, Cad. It was in my space and I couldn’t hit it.”

Caduceus considers it, glancing off into the middle distance as though balancing Fjord’s words, and it makes him grin full-tusked and soothed more than anything he’s felt in a while.

“That’s fair. But you were still afraid of it - yeah, I think that made you _more_ afraid, probably.”

“Most likely,” Fjord agrees.

Caduceus moves slowly when he has the luxury to, deliberate and considerate and the sure sensation of a ship turning its rudder and carving into the swell. Fjord knows he’s going to cup his jaw with palms calloused by battles and gardens and dinners made over campfire before he even does it, but he guesses that’s the entire point, and leans into the brush of fingers against the hinge of his jaw anyway. It’s been a long time since he felt hands that close to his throat that didn’t threaten violence, that didn’t try to wring the air from him. Not many people in his life were intent on _helping_ him breathe, before.

He’s not sure Caduceus is capable of that kind of cruelty. It would’ve sharpened something in him maybe, ages ago, because Fjord absolutely is. He’s exactly that capable, exactly that cruel and unyielding, but he’s trying to be kind, too. He’s trying to be someone deserving of soft, gentle words and understanding glances and being known to the core of him, beneath the thick and cloying layers of dried saltwater. He’s trying.

The firbolg leans forward and presses a kiss to his forehead, feather-light, beard tickling the bridge of his nose. Fjord grins and feels the warmth of his skin as the Wildmother’s own voice, reaching into his chest with sugared spring air and pine needles and peat moss and the promise of life in green, growing things. It doesn’t replace what’s already there, but they’re beginning to plant roots in his lungs, and Caduceus taught him first that beautiful plants can grow from the corpses of other things.

“Mind if I stay for a little longer?” Fjord asks quietly beneath the hum of rain. He watches Caduceus’ ears flick, listening for it.

“Please,” he replies, sitting back onto his knees and withdrawing his hands. They tangle in his lap instead, and Fjord can’t help but notice the way they’re cupped, as though offering something between the curled shells of their bodies - plants tilted towards sunlight in a place with a pitch-black sky.

“Stay until the storm ends.”

x


End file.
